


con te partirò

by gsparkle



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, F/M, Italy, Vacation, Venezia | Venice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-23
Updated: 2017-08-23
Packaged: 2018-12-18 22:57:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11884599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gsparkle/pseuds/gsparkle
Summary: After two fruitless years of chasing the mysterious, faceless Black Widow through Europe, Clint finally demands a vacation. Even assassins need time to decompress, and a month exploring Venice is the perfect way to do it, especially in the company of the gorgeous redhead who's staying just next door.





	con te partirò

**Author's Note:**

> I started on this back in April and it 100% was not meant to be this long...
> 
> Anyway, this all started with an AU prompt, "I always sing along to the song you are playing on the piano in the apartment below," and ballooned from there. The title is the same as the well-known Andrea Bocelli song "Con te Partirò," which translates to "I'll go with you" or "I leave with you," depending on the source. If you don't think you know it, google it: you definitely do! 
> 
> As always, I have to thank **santiagoinbflat,** without whom I wouldn't be a functional person, probably, let alone writer  <3

“She’s in Venice,” Phil tells him; but Clint has been chasing the faceless Black Widow through Europe for two years now, and he’s learned better than to take the certainty in his brow seriously.

“If she’s not there,” he warns, “I want a vacation.”

“She’s there,” Phil says. “I promise.”

\-----

She’s not there.

\-----

Venice in June is muggy and full of mosquitos, but Clint finds he kind of likes it, anyway. He’s never exactly been a fan of enclosed spaces, but chasing random redheads through the city’s tight alleys isn’t so bad when paired with the food and the gondolas and the way the sea opens up once he gets his rented speedboat out of the cramped canals.

“Vacation,” Clint reminds Phil the next time he gets him on the phone. “One month, _minimum._ ”

“Fine,” sighs his handler. Clint wonders sometimes if he is the weary weight in his voice, or if Phil Coulson sounds equally exasperated no matter who he speaks to. “Where do you want to go?”

Clint has been dreaming, no, _fantasizing_ about the ocean for a solid month, of white sands and palm trees and bathing-suit-optional beaches. _Bimini,_ he thinks, _No, The Maldives, Aruba, anywhere I can hear the ocean--_

“Scratch that,” says Phil, cutting into Clint’s daydream. “If you want a month of vacation, you have to stay there and keep your eyes open. Fury’s orders,” he apologizes. “I’ll try to get you a good place.”

\-----

Apparently, Phil feels bad about the situation, as he rents Clint a top floor, corner apartment at the mouth of the Grand Canal, with tall domed windows full of sunlight and an _altana_ balcony where he can sit with a bottle of wine and watch the pickpockets work the Piazzo San Marco from afar. There’s no beach, but the water slaps soothingly against the sinking cement of the foundation, and it’s enough.

He spends two days basking in the _nothingness_ of being on vacation before beginning to feel cooped up and antsy. On the third day, he burns off this excess energy by touring the Palazzo Ducale, eating about a pound of gelato while window shopping, and beating up a pair of would-be muggers who attempt to forcibly divest him of his wallet. It’s only when he’s propped his unconscious attackers in an alley and dusted off his hands that he looks up and sees the shop.

Clint learned three valuable things in his circus adolescence: how to shoot a bow, how to talk to women, and how to play the guitar. Of these three skills, he’s used the last least recently, and his fingers ache for his beat-up guitar back home in New York. Standing here staring at the all-Italian-spruce guitar that catches the setting sunlight, he feels equally homesick and disloyal. It is homesickness that wins out: the desire to cradle something fragile in his calloused hands, to rain music instead of arrows, is too strong. He thinks his guitar back home will understand.

Back at the apartment, Clint props open the balcony door so he can hear the sea, tunes up the guitar, and begins to play. He hasn’t touched an instrument in some time, but the rust falls quick from his fingers and the notes soon ring true into the night. Every strum of the guitar massages another knot of tension from his frame until he is practically boneless. Phil always talks about the tranquility of Tahiti, his preferred vacation spot, and while Clint always laughed, he now understands. _Tranquilized_ is how he feels, the breeze and the sighing water twining exactly like a voice with his guitar.

He can’t remember the last time he felt this relaxed. He sleeps better than he has in years.

\-----

When Clint comes back from getting groceries the next day, there is a woman who is not his landlord entering the apartment next to him; at least, Clint thinks he would have remembered if his landlord had an ass--he cranes his neck to look again--like _that_. Her hair is scooped up under a broad brimmed hat that hides her face, so the only other defining feature he catches before her door closes is the column of her neck, a pink flush heating the pale skin.

 _I'm 80% sure my neighbor is gorgeous,_ he'd write in his journal, if he kept one; but he just texts Phil instead, which is basically the same thing. [ _Stop telling me about your vacation,_ ] replies Phil, exasperated even over text. [ _I'm jealous enough as it is._ ]

Disappointingly, Clint doesn’t see or hear from his mystery neighbor for the rest of the day, even though he finds a reason to exit his apartment about every other hour. By the time he gives up and begins to cook dinner, the dusk has crept up like high tide. After a day of intrigue, restlessness plucks at his sleeve until he takes his guitar out onto the balcony to play.

The night is balmy and clear, the kind of beautiful that reminds him of a wide open sky over peeling circus wagons. If he closes his eyes and plays the right song, he can pretend he’s back in Iowa, a kid pressed tight again against his brother’s side.

It’s a long song, somewhat mournful, and he’s well into the second chorus before he hears it. There, just above the endless slosh of waves--a voice, female, he thinks, weaving amongst his chords in sultry perfection. His hands stutter on the strings for a minute before resettling, and his eyes blink open in search of the voice’s owner. There are two other patios on his side of the building, plus three more in range below. Any of them could host his disembodied voice, but in the twilight it’s impossible to tell without blatant investigation.

Instead, Clint leans into his chair and plays a little louder, heartened when the voice responds in kind. It’s not a song for dancing, but the way the mysterious voice drifts on the wind makes his feet want to trace slow circles with a woman in his arms. He can’t, of course, so the next best thing is to tip his head back and join in, braiding his own voice into the harmony.

Everything else falls away, and when the last chord rolls off his fingers, the rest of Venice crashes back into his ears. He’s still the only one out on their balcony, and when he strikes up another song, he plays alone into the soft night.

\-----

After a couple nights, Clint becomes fairly certain that his nightly duet partner is the still-mysterious woman who lives next door. He’s yet to meet her, but sometimes he hears her speak to their landlord in a low voice that seems to match the one that floats out her windows and curls like tendrils into his dreams.

And, just to be clear, it’s not that he hasn’t _tried_ to put a face to the name. Every time he tries to time his exit with hers, he just misses, catching only the swish of a cotton skirt down the stairwell or the lingering scent of cherries in the hall. Once, he sits at the cafe across from the apartment entrance and pretends he’s not observing the comings and goings, but all he gets for his troubles are an outrageous coffee tab and the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that he’s being a stalker, exactly what he’s taking a vacation from doing.

So, fine. He leaves a pile of euros for the coffee and finds a sprawling marketplace to occupy his attention for the afternoon. Clint has always been a wanderer, even before Carson’s circus replaced his roots with wagon wheels, and picking his slow way through the sunny stalls is the perfect thing to distract him from his neighborly creeping. He lingers out until the _osteria_ owners slide him looks longer than the shadows circling his ankles, and whistles home with the intent to fall right into bed.

But the hall smells like cherries again, and even though his eyelids are drooping from wine and sleep alike, his hands reach instinctively for the guitar. _One song,_ he reasons, and his fingers pull a lullaby from the strings as gentle and sweet at the night itself. His eyes drift shut as he plays, the smell of cherries wafting like a dream beneath his nose.

It takes Clint a few moments to realize that he’s never dreamed in scents before, and another to realize he is no longer alone in the night. _You let your guard down,_ he chastises himself, but all he see when he opens his eyes is a shadow perched on the neighboring balcony ten feet away.

“I was afraid you weren’t coming tonight,” says the shadow, voice pitched just loud enough for him to hear. “Your guitar is the best part of my evening.”

“I couldn’t stay away,” confesses Clint, emboldened by the anonymity the darkness lends. The shadow half-turns away to watch the water, presenting a profile silhouetted by the lights of her apartment. Her delicate nose twitches as her lips turn up in a small smile, and Clint can’t help but add, “You have a beautiful voice.”

She laughs then and turns back to him, her teeth glinting moonlight before her features are swallowed back up by the night. “You wanna get a drink tomorrow night, guitar man?” she asks, the laugh a lingering joke in the low notes of her voice.

It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know what the joke is. “Sure,” he says, “Yes. Definitely yes.”

Her smiles gleams in the light again. “I’ll knock on your door,” she says in parting. Clint grins back as she turns in, and he finally gets the joke when he notices that her hair shines blood red in the light.

\-----

Clint catches the ferry to Murano and texts Phil early the next morning, striving to be casual even as his fingers jitter on the screen. [ _how’s the chase going,_ ] he types as if he’s not 88% sure that he’s just agreed to get drinks with a murderous Russian spy. [ _any updates?_ ]

[ _You are the worst at taking vacation,_ ] Phil shoots back immediately, but nothing follows. Nervous, Clint stress-eats two paninis and stress-buys some Venetian glass nonsense because he’s stared at it for too long and the shopkeeper clearly thinks he’s trying to steal it. It doesn’t make any sense for him to be this flustered about finally finding the woman he’s been scouring Europe for, but until now, she’d always been a concept, a shadowy paper doll with equally two-dimensional values. Clint is a sniper so he doesn’t have to get up close and find that the person he’s been sent to kill laughs kindly at her landlord's bad jokes, or has a voice that blends perfectly with his.

 _It doesn’t matter,_ he tells himself, and really, it’s not like people are incapable of duality, like they can’t help some people and kill others; plus, he doubts that Fury is going to accept “But she knows all the words to my favorite song!” as a legitimate reason not to kill the most wanted woman on the planet.

But. Still.

It’s well into the afternoon when Phil texts again. [ _She’s in Berlin; two confirmed dead,_ ] he writes, and the rate at which relief shoots through Clint’s system might be sacrilegious, all things considered. [ _And she’s blonde now, apparently,_ ] says the follow up. His phone buzzes again: [ _I can call Fury if you want to cut your vacation short. We could use your skill set._ ]

[ _hell no,_ ] Clint types, already wheeling for the ferry station. [ _i have a date tonight._ ]

\-----

Mystery Neighbor has a smile like a secret, sea glass green eyes, and a name: “Natasha,” she tells him, confidentially, her voice folded up like a note passed in class. Clint suggests the _osteria_ across the way where he spent so much time spying, but Natasha pulls him through alleys to a local _trattoria_ whose tables nestle up against the short embankment wall and which puts them in direct sight of the setting sun. Her red hair, so ominous the night before, is now beautifully ablaze, every warm color in the world cascading in ringlets over her shoulder.

In the midst of all this beauty, Clint is sharply reminded that he is _terrible_ at first dates. The longer they sit there together, watching the sunset and sipping the house wine and _not talking,_ the harder it is for him to figure out what to say. It feels too late in the game to pay her a compliment, but that would be better than asking what she does for a living, wouldn’t it? And if work comes up then he’ll have to lie, and he doesn’t want to lie to those eyes, not tonight. So then, again, _what to say--_

“Tell me about your guitar,” she says. Her lips always seem tucked up in a joke, like she knows something he doesn’t, but in the nicest way possible. If he kisses her, he wonders, will the secret pass from her lips to his? “Clint?” she prompts.

“Yes,” he says, “My guitar.” He edits the story, cuts out the muggers entirely and focuses on Vittoria the guitar: “Oh, like you’ve never named some inanimate object?” he teases when she cuts him an incredulous look.

“I--” Her brow furrows a little and she looks down, a dimple appearing in her cheek when she quirks her lips in thought. “I had a bear when I was very little,” she says at last. “I think I called him… Boris. Does that count?”

In Clint’s opinion, no, because _everyone_ named their teddy bears; but there’s a far-off sort of sadness taking over her eyes, so he grins and says, “Boris and Natasha? _Really?_ ”

“Shut up,” she tells him, but she’s smiling again. “Like you were so creative when you were a kid.”

“Actually,” Clint begins, and somehow there’s a circus story tumbling out of his mouth, him and Barney and the rocket ship they’d pretended their cramped trailer really was. He never tells circus stories on the first date, or ever; but there’s something about her whole demeanor that makes him want to open himself up to her, pull out his history one brightly colored scarf tied to the next.

“I think that sounds lovely,” she says, and he likes that there’s not a single trace of pity in her voice. By now the sun is a slim line of blazing orange over the water, and the beginnings of night lie velvet around them.

“I think _you’re_ lovely,” Clint says, and she smiles, close-mouthed, biting her lip as if to keep something bigger back. “Hey, enough about me; what do you do for a living, or like to do, or--?”

“Oh, let’s not talk about work,” she sighs, flicking the question out over the water. “Isn’t vacation supposed to be a break from reality? Let’s talk about… books, or food.” She admits to reading voraciously, even shows him the paperback shoved in her bag just in case. In the dim light their table’s candle lends, Clint reads the title: _Оди́н день Ива́на Дени́совича_. “I love languages,” she explains at his curious glance. “I’m trying to stay fresh.” Her voice dances like moonlight across the water as she talks about her favorite books, nearly all written in languages Clint can’t convincingly say “hello” in. “I’ll read you something Italian later,” she promises.

Now, Clint’s been fluent in Italian since his circus days, but admitting that would be turning down the chance to hear her low voice roll over the language like faraway thunder. He’s intrigued by the way she says _later,_ too, and the way _later_ extends past the crumpled euros on the table, past the gelato they eat on their meandering way home, past even, it seems, this moment, where they stand between their respective doors and wait for the other to speak.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Natasha finally says, a sparkle in her eyes, laughter caught always behind her teeth.

“Okay,” Clint says, and the last time he felt this gawkish and out of sorts was when, at thirteen, he tried out for the flying trapeze routine, leaping from the platform and swinging around the bar before looking down and down and down. The swoop of his stomach, the hammer of his heart--it’s all the same, then and now, except this time he’s not reaching for the one of the Brandt brothers across the dusty air. This time, his finger twirls tentatively into one of Natasha’s corkscrew curls, and when she looks up, he kisses her, his other hand pulling her to him by the small of her back. This time, her mouth falls open under his, and she tastes like tiramisu gelato, and she nibbles his lip and sighs when she kisses him back.

Eventually, Clint realizes they’re pressed up against the wall like teenagers, well on their way to sweaty and disheveled. “Yeah?” he asks, aware it’s not a real question, aware that he doesn’t care, aware that he’s standing again on the exhilarating platform of something high and dangerous.

“ _Later,_ ” Natasha tells him, dark mischievous eyes and wicked smile; and just like in his short-lived trapeze career, Clint falls and falls and falls.

\-----

As it turns out, the perfect-for-creeping _osteria_ across the way also has a decent breakfast menu. “Ah, _l'amante del caffè,_ ” says the host in greeting, evidently remembering Clint’s last visit, and he doesn’t mind because he is immediately brought a hot pot of fresh coffee. It’s things like this that make him wish that he could stay in Venice forever; but he can’t, so he snaps open the newspaper to survey the damage the world has taken overnight. Sex scandal blah blah, stock market whatever, but his eyes catch on a murder in Ostrava, a prominent business man found strangled in his bed. He knows what the rest of the story will reveal--that this man had ties to the Kremlin and former KGB--and what it will not--that his death was at the hands of the Black Widow.

“I saw you from my balcony.” He looks up almost expecting to see the assassin herself, but it’s Natasha, eyes hidden behind oversized sunglasses and red hair a streaming flag in the breeze. “May I join you?”

 _She didn’t have to come down here,_ something fizzy and stupid whispers in his ear. _She’s here because she likes you._ “Please,” Clint says, an invitation to the woman standing in front of him, and a request for his brain to, for once, shut the fuck up. “Sleep well?”

Her lips quirk up as she sits, a little half-smile that makes Clint suspect he wasn’t the only who spent half the night replaying those moments spent pressed up against the wall. “Well enough,” she says. For all that she’s sought out his company, she doesn’t seem very interested in talking, a suspicion confirmed when she pulls a book from her bag and immediately buries her nose in it. After a few seconds, Clint decides this is a good thing: it’s early-ish, and he’s not all that chatty in the morning, either, and he does sometimes wonder why everyone needs to fill conversational voids with noise, why there isn’t more value on the quiet calm that only comes when relaxing next to a friend.

So. He returns to his newspaper, goes back to read about the sex scandal and stock market drops he’d glossed over before, and it’s peaceful. They drink coffee and pick from the same plate of pastries and Clint is just thinking about how shockingly domestic it all is when Natasha slams her book shut with a snort.

“That was _stupid,”_ she huffs, dropping the book on the table. Clint leans over to read the title: _The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet._ It’s not his favorite, either, but she steamrolls right over his attempt to say so. “What are we supposed to learn from this? Who doesn’t already know that children are reckless, or that parents are assholes?” She looks at Clint expectantly.

“Well,” Clint says, grateful that plays and theater were the basis of his meager circus education, “Inevitability, right? Destiny?”

“You mean futility.” He has a feeling he’s not supposed to think it’s cute when she snorts again and blows up a curl of hair. Natasha pushes her sunglasses up onto her head and squints into the sun. “I’d prefer to make my own decisions, thanks.”

Clint leans his elbows on the table. “I mean, who’s to say that the choices we think we’re making ourselves aren’t preordained? We think we’re making decisions, changing plans, but maybe--I dunno, for example, maybe _we_ were meant to meet.” He waggles his eyebrows and she rolls her eyes.

“What makes you so convinced, anyway?” Natasha asks in a tone that doesn’t quite hide her curiosity. “Destiny, fate… love, for that matter: all seems like a lot of bullshit to me.”

It had all seemed like bullshit to him, too, and he’d told the circus tarot reader as much when she’d pulled him in for a reading at fifteen. “Your next fifteen years,” she’d told him anyway, insisted really, then laid out five cards: the Fool, Death, the Hanged Man, the Lovers, the Tower. “You are here,” she’d said, setting one finger on the yellow sun shining on the Fool. “Do not fear Death,” she’d reassured, not that Clint would have admitted concern. “It means only change.” He’d dismissed the whole experience until change came for him in the form of SHIELD, shiny badges and new chances. Once he’d looked up the Hanged Man and saw that its significance hewed far too close to his new life--letting go, moving on, following the rules--he’d been… well, if not _convinced,_ then certainly less skeptical.

“I try to keep an open mind,” he tells her. “What do I know about how the universe works, right? And anyway, even if you’re not sold on the whole idea of fate, you _do_ have to admit that Shakespeare writes a good story. Someone even built her statue in Verona.”

Natasha stares, expression somewhere between resignation and disbelief. “No.”

“ _Yes,_ ” Clint replies, warming to his topic. “From what I’ve heard, there’s a house with a balcony you can pay to go up on, and everyone rubs the statue for good luck and--hey, I mean, if you’re not busy, we could go.”

She gets that same thoughtful look she had the night before, a tiny V-shaped frown between her brows. It seems clear to Clint that’s she’s trying to figure out how best to let him down easy, so he stares at his finger tracing the rim of his coffee cup over and over until her hand crosses into his field of vision and fleetingly brushes the back of his. “You know what,” she says with a smile, “We should,” and next thing he knows, they’re side by side in the back of a dusty train car.

Verona is an hour west by train, a length of time perfect for a nap in the sun flickering through the windows, but every rock of the train brushes Natasha’s arm against his. It’s not that it’s unpleasant; on the contrary, Clint’s arm feels like a matchbook, striking sparks again and again.

“So,” he asks, mainly to divert his attention from the flames under his skin, “What will you read next? More Shakespeare?”

She has this way of rolling her eyes in which she doesn’t really do anything at all, like she’s conserving energy. “Ugh. No.” The book she pulls from her ubiquitous bag is a thick paperback, covered mostly by a portrait of an anemic young man in a cravat. _Le Rouge et le Noir,_ proclaims the title, and Natasha launches into an explanation of hypocritical social climbing and the betrayal of passions. It sounds like a good book, probably, though Clint is admittedly focused less on the plot and more on the glow that rises in her cheeks as she speaks. This becomes embarrassingly obvious when she stops mid-sentence and calmly remarks, “I can see your eyes glazing over.”

“No!” Clint hastily assures her, one apologetic hand flying to hers. “I swear I’m listening; I was just, you know--”  

Natasha nods, a knowing smile tipping up one corner of her mouth. “Dreaming of heavenly pretzels,” she says, the sagacity of her tone at complete odds with the utter nonsense of her words.

“...No,” Clint says again, slow and confused. “What?”

Her porcelain skin flushes pink and an embarrassed grin flickers across her face. “I guess that’s not a common saying in English,” she says. “It’s like--you know, dreaming with your eyes open?”

“ _Daydreaming,_ ” Clint supplies, and she smiles again. “What language is the thing about pretzels from?”

Her gaze retreats, guarded, or so he thinks; a second later, it’s gone. “My first language was Russian,” she explains. “I lived in an orphanage there until I was five, and then I was in a foster home of sorts for a while.” She shrugs, a graceful movement. “Some idioms don’t translate as well as others.”

Clint squashes the dual instincts to both apologize for her childhood and ask fifty more questions about it: he hates knowing what it’s like to be on the receiving end of either scenario. His hand is still on hers, though, and he carefully twines his fingers between hers. “Has this been an issue for you in the past?”

The laugh that catches in her throat is wry. “Oh, many times,” she tells him, pulling one knee up under her chin as she turns to face him. Their hands stay laced together as she details the difficult terrain of moving between Russian and English, how idioms tripped her up and made the chasm between the languages gape even wider. It sounds like a struggle, but her smile still turns tender as she recalls her missteps in translating some of the more common proverbs, how often she’d say she felt “normal” instead of “fine.” Clint’s favorite is the notion that someone is not merely embarrassed, but _a wet chicken;_ he saves that one to use on Phil.

He likes the way she talks. They are alone in the train car, but Natasha’s voice still settles low in the valley between them, quiet and sweet as the stories she tells. He likes the way every word is a secret, chosen precisely for each conversation and held tight behind her lips until the exact right time. Most startling is the realization that he actually maybe likes _her:_ not just those luminous green eyes, but the passion that widens them as their conversation meanders from languages to travel as they pull into Verona’s train station.

“I’ve never traveled just for myself,” she admits as they disembark, stepping close to avoid the crowds. “Before this trip, I just went wherever my boss sent me.”

“I’ll do you one better,” Clint tells her as they leave the station and head off into the city. “My boss said I could vacation here, or not at all.” Though he’s finding it hard to be too mad about that now.

Natasha doesn’t quite smile. “Our bosses sound similar,” she notes as she studies a map, her voice chillier than usual. This is the first he’s heard her speak of her job, but asking more questions would mean a reciprocation of information, and he’s pretty sure “paramilitary assassin” is not an attractive career. That, and he’s pretty sure everything he does is, like, _super_ classified. When the map folds up, however, she only says, “This way,” before taking his hand and leading him off into the city.

This vacation is the first time in awhile where Clint’s had the opportunity to explore somewhere just for the sake of it. They turn down streets just because the sun shines on them, tour church crypts just because their doors are open. Shrines to minor saints turn up in alcoves and gurgling fountains draw them into quiet cul-de-sacs draped with creeping bougainvillea. Clint half wishes he had a camera to help preserve the beauty of the sun filtering gently over the ancient castle they spend half the afternoon roaming, but then he sits in the city's first-century amphitheater and realizes no film strip or file could sufficiently capture how wonderfully insignificant he feels in the shadow of arches built millennia before.

Really, the camera would be to document Natasha, record the smirking curve of her lips, pin down the warmth that bursts in his chest when he makes her laugh. She’s eerily good at navigating and an incredible haggler, but Clint is most taken by how much joy she seems to be getting from the whole experience. He’s never travelled with someone so happy to be somewhere new, so enthusiastic to discover new street foods or lose track of time in a maze of market stalls. They’re never lost, exactly, but sometimes Natasha meets his eyes over the rims of her sunglasses and he thinks he might be getting there.

By the time they make it to Juliet’s balcony, their original destination, the sun is setting and most of the crowds have died off. Cast in bronze and hidden in a quiet courtyard, Juliet holds one hand over her heart, pining eternally for Romeo. Her arms and torso are conspicuously rubbed down, a bright golden sheen that comes, the docent says, from the tradition of placing one hand on Juliet’s heart. “See?” he says, gesturing to a mustached tourist who drapes one arm over the statue’s shoulders before plonking his other hand straight onto her breast. “It’s good luck.”

Natasha rolls her eyes at Clint. “This is dumb,” she leans close to whisper, and he agrees. After the whirlwind day they’ve had--climbing castles, strolling through neighborhoods, learning more about both her and the city they combed through together--it feels anticlimactic to cap it all off with a corny photo for cheap laughs.

Clint waves off the docent beckoning them for a closer look at the gate covered in locks, the wall stuck up with gum, the crumbling balcony that hangs off the wall. Instead, he turns to Natasha and offers her his hand. “Let’s go home.”

She takes his offered hand and together they turn out of the courtyard. The growing dark obscures half her smile as she teases,“You’re not going to admit that fate has finally led you astray?”

“Never,” Clint laughs, thinking of how the hands of The Lovers join together under a brightly shining sun. The streetlights flicker on, illuminating them in the darkness, and he’s pretty sure he’s exactly where he’s meant to be.

\-----

When he asks if she wants to come in for coffee, that’s really all he means. They’ve spent a long day exploring Verona’s numerous nooks and crannies, and normally he’d be tired of socializing with the same person all day long; but he looks at Natasha in the warm hallway lights and doesn’t want to say goodnight just yet. He won’t make a move, won’t curl his arm over her shoulder or her hair around his hands or _anything;_ it would just be nice, he thinks, if tonight she’d tuck her feet under her on his sofa like she belonged there and wrap her smoky voice around the notes of his guitar.

So: “Coffee?” he asks in the hall, and he means it. “No funny business, promise.”

Natasha’s eyes twinkle. “None whatsoever.”

He sees his apartment through her eyes as they enter: long-empty coffee cups by the sink, a rumple of unmade sheets through his open bedroom door. “Sorry about the mess,” he cringes, full of immediate regret. This is probably the worst idea he’s ever had. Probably.

“Mine looks the same,” she laughs, but Clint rather doubts that. From what little he knows of her, he assumes that she washes her dishes as soon as she uses them, no red-tinged wine glasses waiting to be scrubbed the next morning. Natasha doesn’t seem like someone who tolerates mess, which is what makes her continued interest in spending time with him confusing; she must have noticed by now that he’s a _complete_ mess about ninety percent of the time.

“I’m so sure,” Clint prepares to say, but she slips out onto the balcony while he digs in the pantry for the good coffee he only uses for the French press. Even as the warm aroma of coffee drifts through the air, she leans on the balcony railing, tracking the boats coming home in the dark. He can’t bring himself to break the silence when he finally joins her, so he passes over the coffee and their elbows rest alongside each other while the stars become a scintillating ceiling across the blue-black sky.

He’s setting down the dregs of his coffee when she looks over, the green of her eyes covered over by the reflection of the sky. “Tell me about the stars,” she says, and the wistful note that threads through her voice snags on something inside Clint’s chest. The stars have always been Clint’s kites, their strings the longing that shines from his heart when he stands under the night sky and contemplates ever other life he could’ve had. He doesn’t want to ask Natasha what she wishes for, if she has the same yearning for some multitude of unlived lives; instead, Clint resolves to take that wistful thread of her voice and tie it between the stars until she can make out the constellations.

“There’s Cassiopeia, she’s the easiest,” he points out, but she squints against the light pollution of Venice and shakes her head. Clint studies the sky for a minute, then moves, leveling his chin on her shoulder and using his arm to lift hers as if they were one. “See it now?” he asks, placing the tip of her index finger right center of the formation.

“Oh,” she says, so softly that he wouldn’t hear it were he not so close, “I see.” He can’t see her face, but the push of her cheek against his tells him she’s smiling. He shows her the square body of Pegasus, the long sea monster Cetus to the east and the outspread wings of Cygnus towards the west. She marvels at the planets; he does his best not to butcher the mythology that named every pinprick of distant light. The night wraps a warm breeze around them, tucking Natasha closer under his arm, and Clint thinks he could stay like this until sunrise, just him and Natasha and the endless ocean of stars above.

Eventually, she lowers their arms. “It’s late,” she says, though she doesn’t move: her hand is still wrapped around his and her gaze is still fixed on the sky. It’s another few minutes before she tears her eyes from the stars, turns carefully so as not to dislodge his chin from her shoulder. “I should go,” she tells him with even less conviction, her voice little more than a breath across his cheek.

 _Probably,_ Clint thinks, and _yes_ and _please don’t._ He wants very badly to close the whisper distance between them, taste the coffee and starlight on her lips; but he also knows that this will lead them to that rumpled bed inside, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do if they wake up the next morning wrapped in sheets of regret. _No funny business,_ he’d promised, because his secret talent is fucking good things up and the possibility that this fascinating woman would never speak to him again, would never again let her voice cling like soot to the strings of his guitar, is too lonesome a prospect for him to bear. So he says nothing, only sits there and enjoys being close enough to count the eyelashes fluttering against her cheek.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me?” she murmurs, eyes still closed. “I just gave you an opening like a mile wide.”

“No?” Clint blinks. “I told you I wasn’t going to try anything, remember?”

“Yeah, I know,” Natasha says with a smile he doesn’t know how to categorize, “But I thought you’d change your mind.” The smile blossoms into a grin that reaches through his ribcage and squeezes his heart. “The stars _are_ pretty romantic.”

 _It’s not the stars that make me feel this way,_ he wants to tell her, _it’s you, it’s you, it’s you._ It reverberates down to the soles of his feet before bouncing back up, pinging off the ground to remind him where he is. “I’m not saying they’re not,” he says, stringing the right words as carefully as those ancient astronomers connected just the right stars. “And I’m not saying I’m not interested; I just--I don’t want you to think that I, I don’t know, _lured_ you here with the promise of coffee.” He’s been watching a tugboat bob steadily through the waves, but now he brings his gaze back to hers, too close to be anything but honest. “I’m not--I’d never do that; being with you just feels…”

 _Peaceful_ isn’t the word, _peaceful_ doesn’t cover the contented warmth of someone in his arms, of the frisson that only comes when her hand touches his. _Loved_ is far too great a weight to place on this vacation fling, even if Natasha’s soft laughter and brilliant smile have already lodged tight in the atrium of his heart. _Happy_ does nothing to encapsulate the comfort of the blanket of stars that wraps around them both.

He doesn’t know enough words to find what he means, and a helpless shrug roll off his shoulders. “Being with you just feels… _right,_ ” Clint says, though it’s not the word he wants, “And it wouldn’t if you thought I had ulterior motives.”

Natasha’s gentle laugh skips like a pebble across the Grand Canal. “You love coffee too much to have any ulterior motives there,” she tells him, but there’s sincerity pinned to the underside of her joke and Clint waits as she searches the buildings across the water for words. When she speaks again, there’s a tentativeness that wasn’t there before, such a tiny ripple that Clint wonders if he’s imagining it. “I--I could tell that you meant what you said. You’re not the kind of guy who does that.”

“How,” Clint begins, then swallows hard. He kills people for a living. He doesn’t know what kind of guy he is, what kind of person. “How do you know?”

Again her gaze dips away from his. She seems almost frustrated, agitated by her confession, as if for once she can’t keep her secrets held tight beneath her tongue. “You have the most honest eyes I’ve ever seen, and you look at me like I’m--like I’m a _person,_ ” she tells him. It takes him a second to realize that the look in her eyes is bewilderment, and another to comprehend the idea that anyone’s ever _not_ seen what he sees. The thought would stagger him back if not for the fact that Natasha turns into his arms and looks up with fire blazing in her expression. “I don’t go places I don’t want to,” she insists. “If I didn’t want this to happen, it wouldn’t be; but _god_ Clint, I’ve never let myself want something so badly as this.”

 _This_ is Natasha pushing up on her toes to scorch him with a kiss so meltingly fierce that he’d topple into the canal if not for the balcony holding him up. Her tongue runs electricity along the seam of his lips, and when he lets his mouth fall open, the same charge surges through his veins. Clint has kissed plenty of people, but it’s never felt like _this,_ like a summer storm cell simmering beneath his skin. Natasha’s delicate hands rake lighting through his hair and the thunder-- _god,_ the thunder is the fine tremble of his hands as he slides them down her back.

His hands had been steady the night before, when she’d looked up in the dim light of the hall and his every molecule had been infused with lust. His hands are _always_ steady, that’s his _job,_ but now Natasha’s eyes are filled with this mix of raw heat and wonderment that makes his heart knock against his ribcage and send a tremor through his bones. “Yes?” she asks, her lips brushing against his with the single movement of her mouth.

“Yes,” he says, balancing the shivers of his hands against the stability of her hips, the solid firmness of the muscles beneath her skin. _“Yes.”_ He spreads one hand against the small of her back, bears down on her mouth with the intent to find every secret she keeps hidden there. Her fingernails scrape gently from his scalp to the nape of his neck, tracing patterns that he can’t discern, and he earns a shudder when his own hand slides gently through the spiraling fire of her hair. The moon is their spotlight and Clint could swear on the eternity of this moment, on Natasha’s hands soft and warm against him in the cool Venetian breeze.

He doesn’t know how much time has passed when she looks up at him with bright shining eyes, hands sure against the hem of his t-shirt. “I’m cold,” she says, even though he can feel the heat that blazes beneath the soft cotton of her clothes. “Let’s go,” and he’d go anywhere with her, jump continents or planets or galaxies if it meant keeping her hands in his; but she presses him towards the apartment, towards the aroma of coffee still hanging in the air. Inside, her hands ghost over his stomach as she peels his shirt from his chest, tosses it away, and she stares at him for long seconds, her fingers flexing over his abs. Clint revels in her touch, in her surprise and in the exploration she embarks upon, sliding her soft fingertips along the ridges and planes of his muscles.

Too shy to let her look without interruption, he reaches for her, skims his hands along the soft skin under her shirt and kisses her when she gasps at the sensation. It would be the easiest thing in the world to push her shirt up and off, but he hesitates, fingers toying with her hem. He gets the impression that she’s not used to being asked for permission, a suspicion confirmed when he asks, “May I?” and a fine wrinkle appears across the bridge of her nose.

Natasha looks down at his still hands waiting at her waist. “Yes,” she says, flustered, “Of course,” and the way she nods in confusion makes Clint’s heart ache. Not for the first time, he wonders what kind of people she spends her time with when she’s not on vacation, but she leans forward to press the heat of her open mouth against the pulse thrumming in his neck and he’s reminded of the task at hand. He pulls the shirt up and over as gently as he can, separating from her momentarily before it’s gone and he can run his hands over the coral lace of her bra, the unbelievable silk of her skin. Her hands rake across his torso while he maps the curvature of her ribs, fingers the delicate mountain range of her spine, one hill after the other until his hands reach the base of her skull and delve once more into her hair.

Kissing Natasha like this, slow and careful and barely undressed in the single light of his living room, is revelatory. Has he ever lingered so long in the corner of a shoulder, memorized a single clavicle so perfectly with his lips and tongue alone? And yet he could go on forever if it meant that Natasha would keep making that small noise in the back of her throat that cuts right to the center of him. She clutches at the jut of his hipbones and his hands come back to her waist and when their mouths meet again he can feel her smile against his lips.

“You’re so… _gentle_ ,” she says with a little laugh, self-conscious and surprised.

His hands, lacing their way into the loops of her jeans, pause, and he leans back to meet the brightness of her gaze. “Shouldn’t I be?” Clint asks, his voice perfectly level.

“Yes, I--just--” she starts, and for a woman so closed off at times she’s remarkably easy to read. _Yes, you should, but nobody ever has,_ he hears in the pause before she repeats, with just a hint of jade in her green eyes, “Yes.”

He kisses her then, kisses her as gentle and careful and perfect as she deserves, and resolves to let Natasha lead the way. He doesn’t reach for the waistband of her jeans until she’s pushed down his own, leaving him only in his purple boxer briefs. He trails his fingers along the lace edges of her underwear (also coral, of course), but doesn’t lift her into his arms and carry her into the mess of his bedroom until the cool heel of her foot rubs a line up his thigh. He makes no move for the clasp of her bra, but waits until she reaches back to unhook it and throw it aside, so that by the time they fall into bed there’s nothing between his skin and hers.

The room is dark, the moon striping over their bodies between the wooden slats of the blinds. Natasha’s beauty is ethereal in the moonlight, the pale of her skin almost glowing in the blue light. She doesn’t let him stare for long, reaching for his face and kissing him harder, with more urgency, biting his lip. “I’m not fragile,” she says, her voice hot in his ear like _fragile_ is a dirty word, and then her teeth are scraping along the shell of his ear and Clint arches into her involuntarily. He wants to tell her that he doesn’t touch her with soft hands because she’s going to break, that there is a difference between _fragile_ and _rare_ , that she’s only the latter but that both require care. But he’s not good with words, never has been, and especially not when her mouth is traveling down his neck and across his chest while her quick hands slip down his stomach and into his shorts and-- _oh god_ \--

“H-hold on,” he says, pulling her hands up because he’s not going to make it if she touches him like that. He kisses the self-satisfied smirk off her face and curves his palms under the weight of her breasts, his touch light until she squirms impatiently, pressing herself more fully into his hands. Her skin is cool and she shivers as he finally brings his mouth to one breast and then the other, curling circular paths with his tongue that lead him down to her navel, down past the lace trim of the underwear he pulls off and away, down until he’s right at her center and she’s gasping from the teasing pressure of his mouth.

“Clint,” Natasha says, low and breathless, and he doesn’t know if it’s surprise or request or warning or all of the above; but then she clarifies, _“Please._ ” In truth, this is his favorite part: learning the right amount of pressure to make her dig her heels into the mattress, running the flat of his tongue against her over and over until she shakes, sliding his fingers in to tap the exact right place at the exact right time, until her hips lift from the bed and her thighs press his ears so tightly he suspects they might snap his neck. But death would be worth it, he thinks; he’d risk his neck again and again just to see her head fall back and eyes slam shut as she comes fantastically apart around his hand.

She’s still out of breath when he crawls back up to her, but her hands curl around his shoulders and her kiss is almost bruising in its intensity. “Now,” she says, _“Now,”_ and there’s a fumble as Clint gropes blindly for a condom in the bedside drawer while Natasha wrestles off his underwear as if it has personally offended her. By the time he finds what he’s looking for, he’s flat on his back and she’s straddling his hips and it’s taking all his powers of concentration not to push up into her in one easy stroke. She seems to know this, if the catlike smile on her face is any indication. “I’ll take that,” she says, ripping open the foil and sheathing him with hands far steadier than his, and then--

There is nothing, he thinks, more beautiful than the way Natasha sits above him, the arch of her body ribboned in the blue light of the moon. She could be carved of marble, equally smooth and pale and compelling as the Venus de Milo, if not for the riotous curtain of red hair that surrounds him when she leans down to brush her lips against his. “You’re incredible,” Clint tells her, and she gives him a look somewhere between _I know_ and _I haven’t even done anything yet,_ and then she’s moving on him, slow and torturous. While his hands try desperately to touch every square inch of her skin, she throws her hair back like a surfacing mermaid and laughs, the most breathlessly glorious sound he’s ever heard.

“You’re not so bad yourself,” she tells him with a grin. He can tell she’s close by the stuttering of her rhythm, the way she tightens around him in the most exquisite sort of torment, and he lifts his hips to meet her stroke for stroke. “Clint, I--” He presses his thumb between her legs in just the right spot and she shatters, pulsing so tightly that it only takes one more thrust before he follows her over the edge into oblivion with a muffled shout.

It could be minutes or hours or years before he surfaces, boneless and content. “Hi,” he says, gravelly and a little shy.

Natasha’s eyes drift open. “Hi,” she replies with a sleepy smile, dropping onto his lips a languid kiss that stretches comfortably, unhurried and slow. Eventually, she rolls off him and gets lost in the chaos of his sheets. “Also, your bed is a mess.”

From the bathroom, Clint calls, “Whose fault is that?” and gets a huff of laughter in response. Stepping back into the room, he finds Natasha searching through the sheets, presumably for her underwear. “You, um,” he says, awkwardly aware of his nakedness and the _after_ ness of it all, “You don’t have to go.”

Even in the dark he can make out the sardonic upturn of her lips. “You don’t have to say that,” she says lightly, as if letting him off the hook. “I’m sure you’d like the bed to yourself.”

He’s certainly the type to sprawl for all corners of the mattress, but the prospect, compared to the possibility of waking up with the scent of Natasha’s errant curls, is abruptly bleak and lonely. She watches him cross the room and slide into bed next to her, sitting so that they only touch where his little finger brushes hers. “I want you to stay,” he says, quiet but sure, his eyes searching hers in the dark. “Really. I do. If you want.”

She looks at him for a long time, her examining gaze tingling over his skin. “Then I’ll stay,” she says softly, and turns her hand to tangle with his in the moonlight.

\-----

There’s a moment at 3 AM when he wakes, nose buried in the crook of her neck, arm slung over her slender waist, and thinks this must be what normalcy is; but in the full morning sunlight, he finds himself holding nothing but air.

Trying not to be disappointed, Clint rolls out of bed and stumbles into the kitchen, only to have the twin aromas of coffee and frying eggs smack him in the face. At the stove is Natasha, wearing his t-shirt better than he ever could and poking at his frying pan with an expression of extreme concentration. It’s a charming scene, the sunlight hitting the gold notes of her hair while the sea sloshes in the background; and when he sighs in spite of himself she turns, says, “About time you rolled out of bed,” grants him the benefit of one wide, unchecked, sunny smile, and his heart just--

No, it’s not that moment; that’s the time Clint scoops her up onto the counter, mumbles, “ _God,_ you are a goddess,” into the warmth of her mouth, twists his fingers in her hair and throws his t-shirt far from the glory of her body and forgets about coffee for maybe the first time in his entire adult life. The eggs burn, and she informs him after that it’s his fault, as if he doesn’t know. “You gotta do what you gotta do,” he says, and she rolls her eyes even as her cheeks flush pink.

Not that it’s always like this. There are mornings when he wakes up alone and she’s not in the kitchen, when he hears her bumping around on the other side of the wall in her own apartment. There are days he doesn’t see any sign of her until the sun is truly set, until he’s mindlessly strumming his guitar on the balcony and suddenly she’s there, too, her voice a streak of smoke in the wind. And there are nights when she cries out in the circle of his arms, when she rolls away and stares at him as if she’s never seen him before, when the moonlight is icy and her face is sharp and Clint remembers that he barely knows this woman at all.

But there’s the day they pack a basket, a blanket, and his trusty guitar, and take his rented boat up the coast to the beaches in Lido di Jesolo. Natasha wears her enormous hat and a tiny black bikini, a juxtaposition for which Clint teases her endlessly. “Just because I burn,” she says, defensively slathering sunscreen down her arms, “Doesn’t mean I can’t look good.” She proceeds to ignore him in favor of her book, this time _Il nome della rosa,_ so Clint stretches out on the blanket and lets the sun and the waves lull him to sleep. He wakes maybe an hour later to freckles sprouting on his arms and shoulders and Natasha standing at the edge of the water, waves lapping at her feet. She’d said she liked the beach, but there’s something melancholy about the way her arms wrap around her middle as she stares into the horizon. “There’s just so much out there, you know?” she asks, not looking at him as he comes to stand next to her. “I haven’t been anywhere at all, really.” Clint takes her hand, soothes her palm with his thumb as they watch the Adriatic Sea, and then he turns to her and promises--

No, he doesn’t; he knows better than that. But he holds her hand there for a long moment and thinks, _I would take you everywhere, anywhere, if I could;_ keeps that single bright thought in his mind as he nudges her giant hat aside and kisses her temple.

Other days, they find the most out of the way cafes and restaurants and only speak Italian, even when they get home. They pay too much to take a guided gondola tour under the Bridge of Sighs. Clint tries his hand at glassblowing in Murano and makes a complete idiot of himself, but Natasha strings the misshapen blob onto a chain and swears, with minimal laughter, that she’ll treasure it forever. They go to Florence for a day and almost get kicked out of the Uffizi for giggling at their own stupid uncultured commentary about priceless works of art. They open a bottle of wine and sit on the balcony until sunrise, talking about politics and philosophy and literature and science, everything and nothing at all.

He’s not sure, exactly, when they become a _they_ at all, when he starts expecting her to be around. Clint has always been a social loner, has always been friendly while keeping humanity as a whole at arm’s length; but when it comes to Natasha, for whatever reason, all his usual defenses are useless. He likes learning that she _is_ sort of messy in her own way after all, leaving her endless cycle of books around his apartment but insisting on washing the dishes, resolutely refusing to fold laundry but pointedly making the bed. “It matters,” she tells him airily as she tucks the sheet corners in with ruthless precision. “It shows that at least we got out of bed today.”

Sometimes they don’t, though; sometimes they spend the whole day tangled up in each other, intertwined like the vines of ivy that climb outside his window, talking, laughing, kissing, moving together as the sun rises and falls. They trade language lessons, Russian for American Sign Language, only the basics: _hello, I love you, thank you, goodbye._ In the daylight, she tells him that she loves foxes, that she’s never ridden a roller coaster, that nobody has ever satisfactorily explained to her just what is so great about _Friends._ Clint’s no good at crosswords, especially not in Italian, but he helps when he can and distracts her when he can’t, singing cheesy songs in bad accents until she’s laughing and kissing him to shut him up.

And at night--at night he feels like he can tell her anything in the darkness, how his parents died and his brother left, how he’s never sure he’ll amount to anything much. At night Natasha holds his hand in a vise grip and tells the ceiling that she used to live under the care of a cruel man named Ivan, that she had an adopted sister named Yelena, that Natasha ran away and that Yelena didn’t and that every single day she feels guilty for not saving her. At night Natasha cries and Clint holds her because she is the rarest and most precious thing he knows, and he thinks maybe he could be this, have this, _love--_

(But he never sees the inside of her apartment. But they never, ever talk about work. But she is only Natasha and he is only Clint, single names for single people who cannot depart from their solitary lives.)

On the day it happens, Natasha comes back from one of her mysterious outings with a shopping bag and a glowing smile. “Clear your schedule,” she announces, as if Clint isn’t lying on the couch, naked but for his guitar, trying not to insert her name into every song he plays. “And put some pants on.”

“Aw, Nat,” he says, mainly because she always pretends not to smile when he shortens her name. When he comes back out of the bedroom, she’s cleared off the central counter of his kitchen and set out flour, eggs, and some kind of contraption. “That looks dangerous.”

She rolls her eyes. “It’s a pasta crank,” she tells him, frowning at the directions. Clint comes to stand behind her and study the instruction sheet over her a shoulder, which is really just an excuse to wrap his hands around her waist, bury his nose in her hair. “Here, figure this out,” she says, twirling out of his grasp with a quick kiss to pop open a bottle of wine. Clint fiddles with the device and she kneads the dough, her hands strong and capable. Making pasta, it turns out, is not a quick pursuit: they have to feed the dough through the crank over and over, and it stretches into endless sheets that has Clint thinking murderously towards the entire bottom of the food pyramid. When at long last it’s finally thin enough to slice into fettuccine, they’re both sweaty and hot and covered in flour.

So it’s an unlikely moment, really, and there’s nothing all that groundbreaking about the mechanics of cutting cleanly through thin dough; but Natasha catches the first ribbons of pasta like they’re the first thing she’s ever created in her life and smiles so elatedly that Clint just can’t hold it back anymore. “This,” she says with wonderful laughter in her voice, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever done.”

This is the moment--yes, this one, the one in the wreckage of his kitchen, where his feet ache and he’s fairly certain he stinks--that Clint knows he loves her, irrevocably, full stop. There’s a streak of flour across her chin, a flaming strand of hair plastered to her forehead, and she is so full of joy that it shines out of her, blinds him, strips away all the denial he’s heaped up around his heart.

Accepting that he’s a fool, accepting the imminent breakage of his heart, he kisses her anyway as if for the first time, as if this counter he holds her against is that hallway and he’s falling and falling and falling again. “What,” says Natasha, with a blissful sigh, “Was that all about?”

“Nothing,” Clint says. “You’re just the best”-- _person, friend, woman, spirit--_ “pasta maker I’ve ever met.”

\-----

He _knows,_ okay, he knows he has to say it. In the sex-rumpled sheets of what has become not his bed but theirs, Clint curls around Natasha’s back even though he’s still sweaty and panting and warm. “I’m--” he whispers into her hair, cowardly, scared. “I have to leave in two days.”

She rolls to face him, blinks up with eyes like endless pools. “I figured as much,” she says quietly, her fingertips leaving indelible prints on his chest. “I have to go soon, too.”

He always knew this was impermanent, a dreamy month away from the harsh realities of the world; they both did, and yet the road rises to meet them and Clint thinks-- _hopes--_ that Natasha is no readier than he is to diverge from their shared path.

“There’s still some time,” he says, and she nods, slow and thoughtful. “I thought maybe we’d go somewhere fancy, if you want; suit and dress and all that jazz.” He can feel his voice almost breaking on every other word, the weight of his heart barely supported by his brittle tongue. Natasha has never been the fragile one; it’s always been him, his stupid and flimsy and unguarded heart.

She studies him for an endless minute, her eyes unreadable and dark; and then she kisses him, soft and open-mouthed. “That sounds nice,” she says, smile small but dazzling in the night. “I’ll wear something red.”

Clint tucks her head under his chin and kisses her crown. “This has been the best month of my life,” he whispers, once again into her hair, and pretends that the arm she snakes around his back means she feels the same way, too.

\-----

He knows before he opens her eyes that she’s gone. All her books have disappeared from the bedside table, and that broad-brimmed hat she loved so much is no longer flung casually on the sofa. When he pokes his head into the hall, he runs into his landlord, who tells him that she’d left her keys and the rest of her rent under his door. “She was a nice lady,” rues the landlord, _“Una bella donna.”_

“She was,” Clint agrees. “She was.” He shuts his door quietly, holds his hands tight so they won’t shake. Halfway through his mechanical filling of the French press, his eyes catch on a gleam of silver. She’s left the pasta crank in the middle of the counter, a folded square of cream stationery with his name written in her perfectly looping handwriting. _Something to remember me by,_ says the note, _Always, Natasha,_ and Clint fights the urge to crumple it, to cry, to feel anything at all.

It takes him an hour to shove everything into his suitcases; he’s always traveled light. Part of him wants to leave the pasta maker, leave Vittoria the guitar, leave any and everything that will remind him of her; but her scent is still woven in his clothes, her laughter knotted inexorably around his ribs, and he knows he won’t be able to forget.

“Barton?” Phil picks up on the second ring, surprise evident in his usually mild voice. “You still have two days until your scheduled extraction.” He chuckles. “Didn’t work out with the gorgeous neighbor after all, I guess.”

“Phil,” Clint laughs cynically, glad for the staticky connection that covers the raw scrape of his voice, “When does anything ever work out for me?”

“Never,” Phil agrees, cheerfully oblivious to the crushing of Clint’s heart. “Meet up in thirty minutes in the Giardini Reali and we’ll get you back to the real world.”

\-----

July fades into August and then into September just like his freckles fade under the long sleeves of his uniform. He sends Vittoria the guitar back to New York, but hauls that stupid pasta crank around Europe like an albatross, a penance for the anger that swarms under his skin like fire ants for two miserable weeks.

She was right to leave, he knows now. In retrospect, there was no scenario that wasn’t going to end with him holding her in that promised red dress and saying something incredibly, astronomically stupid. _Natasha, I love you,_ he would’ve said, would’ve pressed it into her skin with his mouth like blooming flowers, and everything would be worse.

Not that this is much better. Instead of angry, he’s just heavyhearted, recalibrating the heft of his bow to balance with the new weight of his heart. It doesn’t help that he’s plodding through Europe again, forever, stalking down alleys in different cities that always feel the same. Phil has stopped making promises, has stopped saying, “Ah, we’ll get her next time!” with forced camaraderie. It’s been two and a half years of this chase now, and they’re tired. The only grim satisfaction Clint finds in the whole ordeal is that the Black Widow is blonde now: what he would do if he was hunting for a redhead, he doesn’t know.

At the end of September, just as the leaves in Dresden are turning an achingly familiar shade of crimson, they catch a break. The Black Widow, their source reports, will be attending the performance of Prokofiev’s _Romeo and Juliet_ and ensuing reception at the Semperoper house in three days. [ _It’s black tie,_ ] says the source, ex-KGB and now highly placed in Russia’s Federal Security Service. [ _Her hair and he dress will both be red._ ]

So there’s Clint, hair combed, tuxedo tailored to perfection, leaning against a green and white marbled column after the performance, scanning the crowd like a hawk. The opera house is packed with people, entrances choked with crowds of German elites. There’s a full gradient of red gowns, and an equally impressive roster of redheads, but the one woman who falls in the center of this particular Venn diagram eludes his gaze. He can’t miss her, can’t let her slip through his fingers this time, because he wants to go home and the syringe in his jacket pocket is the only ticket he has.

So when the crowd parts and reveals a solitary red haired woman standing much as he is, keeping an eye on the exits even as she flicks dust from the scarlet lengths of her dress, Clint assumes the universe is finally doing him a solid. And when he sees her head to the bar, he appreciates the perfect opening the universe is giving him: “Let me get that for you, ma’am,” he says, all country boy charm. “A beautiful woman like yourself shouldn’t have to buy her own drinks.” He rests his hand in the middle of her back, passes cash to the bartender without even glancing her way; and she says, “Thank you,” and she looks up with a gratified smile, and it’s only the years and years of training that keeps Clint from dropping his glass of whiskey directly down her dress.

The universe is _not_ doing him a solid, the universe is decidedly doing him whatever the _opposite_ of a solid is, because of the 650-odd women in this beautifully constructed atrium, the only one whose hair and dress are both undeniably red is the one whose company he’s been mourning these three months, whose absence has torn a yawning hole in his heart. “Clint!” says Natasha, beautifully delighted, the crinkling of her eyes as she smiles the most awful thing he’s ever seen. “How did you--I--” She laughs, at loss for words. “What are you doing here?”

And what, exactly, is he supposed to say?

“I’m--here to kill you,” he says, which is pretty dumb, all things considered. In fairness, though, he _feels_ dumb, utterly poleaxed by the convoluted tangle of events that has led him to this moment, to him standing in this German opera house, staring at the woman his heart aches for. Wildly, he bargains with the universe: _I’ll search for the Black Widow forever if you’ll just please make it not her. I’ll give up baseball. I’ll give up beer. Please. I’ll stay here in this labyrinth of back alley murders until the end of time if you’ll just let me have this one good thing._

“I see,” says Natasha, and those two syllables wash all the joy out of her face, leaving only an inscrutable mask that confirms that this is no mistake. In their month together, Clint has never seen this face, this emotionless and regal affectation that drops like a shroud across her shoulders. With one deliberate motion, she throws back the contents of her drink, raises her eyebrow until Clint does the same, sets their glasses back on the bar. He stares at the familiar glob of blown glass strung on a chain, nestled in the perfect hollow of her throat.

“Let’s dance,” Natasha says, winding her arm through his and leading him over to the dance floor. “Before you kill me, I mean.” There’s a dark humor twisting her low voice, a matching morbid smirk on her lips as they take a place amongst the dancers and begin to move, Natasha doing most of the leading. “I’m ready to go, mostly; just a song or two, if you don’t mind.”

“R-ready to go?” Clint manages: the freefall of his emotional stability is making it hard for him to breathe.

Her smile isn’t a smile. He could see how some people might think so, what with the dazzling display of teeth; but he knows the way happiness quietly curves her mouth, brings light to her eyes, how it imbues her every movement with a unique radiant grace. “To die, darling,” she says, as if this is obvious, as if it doesn’t flush his system with a feeling of wrongness so strong he stumbles against her foot. Blithely, she continues, “I knew it was only a matter of time. I’ve been ready for months, since I--” She falters for the first time, though it’s quickly covered up by a glance flicked over his shoulder. “Since we parted ways.”

“Since you _disappeared,_ ” Clint accuses; here, at least, he knows how to feel. “Since you _vanished_ in the middle of the night. Damn it, Natasha, I wanted--” _I wanted to hold you under the night sky and pretend that daylight would never come. To believe that we’d keep in touch, that we’d maybe meet again some day. To hold you one last night and mean it, really mean it, like I’ve never meant anything before._

“To tell me that you loved me,” she says, horribly gentle, knowing, kind. “I know. And that wouldn’t have done, because I would have told you that I loved _you,_ and then where would we be?”

Clint clenches his jaw and glares at a nearby statue. Trust Natasha to do _this,_ to wrap up an acknowledgement of his love and a profession of her own in one nonchalant package. And she’s right, of course she’s fucking right, and he can’t do a single goddamn thing about it. “Why aren’t you going to fight me?” he asks, his voice angry and tight. “Don’t you want to live?”

Natasha’s smile is sad, filled with a wisdom he doesn’t understand. “I have done many terrible things,” she says under the violins of the waltz, “And I have lived on borrowed time since I was five years old. At least I’ve lived a little--you helped me with that, and for that I am forever indebted to you--and at least I’ll die free.”

He opens his mouth to speak, then closes it, thinking back to a ride through the Italian countryside, a grubby train car made beautiful by her voice. _I lived in an orphanage there until I was five,_ he remembers her saying. _I was in a foster home of sorts for a while._ “How can a five year old live on borrowed time?” Clint asks. There’s more irritation in his voice than there should be, probably, but his heart hurts and half of what she’s saying just isn’t making sense. “What could you have possibly done?”

For the first time, Natasha draws back, her surprise evident. “You--you don’t know?” she asks.

“I know enough,” Clint says, uneasy. He wishes they weren’t dancing anymore, forced to remain calm and keep their voices low. He wishes he could yell, shake her shoulders, beg her to tell him that this was all an elaborate joke. “São Paulo, Drakov’s daughter, all the others--”

Natasha waves those sins away. “Yes,” she says, impatient, “Yes, I know what I’ve done; but don’t _you_ know about the Red Room? Doesn’t--” Her voice teeters on the edge of breaking. “Doesn’t _anyone_ know what they do?”

Unbidden, a memory rushes to fill Clint’s eyes: Natasha, curled as small as she can make herself, shaking in recollection of her childhood. He knows better than to think that was false; he knows the way trauma’s tectonic plates never settle completely under the surface, the way they flare into earthquakes at any turn. He looks square into her eyes. “Tell me.”

She does. She explains how the KGB created a program to train young Soviets into killing machines, how they’d recruit or buy girls from orphanages all over Russia and bring them to the Red Room. “They brainwashed us,” she tells him as they move automatically through dance steps. “Ivan, I mean, and his team. They told us we were studying to become ballerinas.” There was studying, yes, but of a different kind: the parts of a gun, the locations of the major arteries, the right way to strangle a man. Her first official kill was at the age of seven, but by that time she’d fought through several classmates, left a slew of girls bleeding out on the floor in the name of self-preservation. By fourteen, she and Yelena were the only ones left, kept in check by Ivan’s brainwashing; ten years later, however, he got complacent, overconfident in Natasha’s loyalty.

“I started to fight the programming.” There are bridges made of weaker steel than her voice. “It took me two years to shake it entirely, to figure out who I actually was, remember what I’d done. Ivan didn’t notice. I tried to break through to Yelena, but she--we were always different. I wanted to survive and she wanted to win, even when it didn’t matter. I think she thought my leaving would be an opportunity for her to finally be the best.” Natasha smiles like the slash of a razor. “I guess she convinced Ivan. If you’ve been directed here for me, they must not want me back after all.”

Most people see red when they go into a rage; Clint does not. Clint sees the cheap wine his father stank of, the mottled eggplant of old bruises on his mother’s cheeks, the lilacs his grief-numbed hands planted on her grave. He sees Barney in his indigo Trickshot uniform, livid that Clint’s ruined the Swordsman’s embezzlement scheme; he sees his hideously violet, painstakingly hand-sewn Hawkeye costume destroyed in the mud. For Clint, rage is more than just the red of anger: it’s immutably blended with sadness, tainted by blue sorrows, and now it rises in him, outrage and anguish for her stolen life, for all the innocent children preyed upon by greed and inhumanity in the coldest of wars.

“And Berlin?” he asks, voice stiff with the need to keep the bubbling purple of his fury in check. “Ostrava? The rest that happened while we were in Venice?”

“Yelena,” Natasha says bitterly. She looks down. “I assume they pulled her up to active duty after they lost me in Venice.” Her gaze returns to his with palpable force. “When I’m gone,” she says, “After you kill me, you can’t give up. Ivan--he’s a monster, and the Red Room must be stopped. Promise me, Clint.” Her grip is iron on his shoulder when he shakes his head, looks away. _“Promise.”_

Clint gives up all pretense of dancing, brings his hand up to brush the softness of her cheek. “I promise,” he says at length. “I will bring them down.”

Natasha nods with the dignity and grace of a monarch. “Then let’s go.” She knows her way around the opera house much better than he does, and navigates them to an isolated alcove, close to an exit. There’s even, she points out, a nice set of armchairs. She is striking even in the dim fluorescent light, even in this funereal procession: a singular picture of elegance. “This is the best place,” she says knowledgeably. “Nobody will find me here for a while; I would know, I once strangled a Lithuanian diplomat here and left him for hours. I don’t regret that one: he was a human trafficker.” Her smirk is grim as she settles into a chair. “So, how’s this going to go?”

“Nat,” he protests, has been fruitlessly protesting since they left the dance floor. “Natasha. You can’t seriously--I’m not going to do this, I--”

“Clint,” she cuts him off, reaches into his breast pocket for the syringe that slaps against his heart. Peering at the label, she nods in approval. “Quick and painless. Better than I deserve.” Natasha pushes the syringe into his hand, curls his fingers around it. “Clint,” she says again, dead serious. “This is what has to happen. The world is better off without me.”

 _Actually,_ Clint thinks, staring hard at the vial of death in his hands. _It isn’t._ He’s lived in a world without Natasha, functionally, and it was misery magnified tenfold. A world without Natasha, he knows, is a world without a whirlwind of books, without her lousy excuse for coffee, without her deep laughter or her kindness or her brilliance or her million other attributes, good and bad alike. And that, he fully admits, is only his own selfishness, his own heart. On a global perspective, there is nobody even close to her level of skill, strategic intellect, tactical planning--and he’d know, considering how long it’s taken to track her down, and even then, only by accident. And there’s not a single other person on earth who can bear righteous witness to the Red Room’s atrocities, who could stand to accomplish such explosive redemption, who deserves such a chance for atonement.

He makes his decision. Dropping the syringe on the the floor, Clint stomps on it, cracking the glass until the carpet soaks up the poison. “What are you _doing?_ ” Natasha cries, her eyes full of confusion. “You promised!”

“Here’s the thing,” Clint says lightly, pulling her up by the hand until she stands next to him. “I _promised_ I’d take out the Red Room. Why would I kill the person who best knows how to do that? If there’s one thing Nick Fury taught me, it’s never to waste resources.”

Natasha blinks. “You’re the archer,” she says in sudden realization as this information clicks into her mental database. “From SHIELD. You’re good: you almost caught me in Chisinau. God, that was two years ago; you’ve been after me _that_ long?” She casts an appraising eye over him, as if meeting him for the first time. “I wondered what kind of workout you did to get arms like that…” With a small shake of her head, she refocuses. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not--my ledger is too red for the likes of SHIELD to ever let you work with me.”

Clint takes her other hand. “The thing about ledgers,” he says, deliberately meeting her eyes, “Is that they’re meant to be balanced. I can help you do that, if you’ll let me. And the thing about SHIELD is--”

Natasha waits, her green eyes wide as the Adriatic Sea, and Clint know that no matter what happens, no matter what Nick Fury says, he’ll never leave her side again. “The thing about SHIELD is?” she repeats, a hopeful edge to her voice.

Clint grins, unrepentant. “The thing about SHIELD is that I’ve never really been all that  great at following their instructions.”

\-----

72 hours later, she’s released from the Triskelion’s temporary detention center with a contract, a badge, and an official probationary timeline. “Natasha Romanoff,” she announces, unable to keep the pride out of her voice as she drops onto the bench Clint occupies. “Agent of SHIELD.”

“Huh,” Clint says, a twinkle in his eye. “Your last name’s Romanoff? Wish I’d known that before I brought you in: I have a real problem with dethroned Russian dynasties.”

“Too bad,” Natasha says. “You’re stuck with me now.” She peers at his own badge hooked to his waist. “Barton? Hmm. Suits you.”

“I like to think so.” This bench is his favorite: it overlooks the bustling atrium, giving him almost a bird’s-eye view of the hubbub below. And it’s nice to sit here with Natasha, quiet in the sunlight and distant noise that echoes up to meet them.

“Hey,” she says after a long while, sliding finger along the back of his hand. “Listen. Thank you. I don’t know how you pulled this off, but I owe you my life.”

One day, he’ll tell her. How Phil, whom he expected to blow up entirely, merely said, “Only you, Barton,” and went off to get the appropriate paperwork. How he’d argued with the Deputy Director for a matter of days until she’d finally thrown up her hands and shouted, “Fine! Enjoy getting stabbed!” with more emotion than he’d seen from her in their eight years of acquaintance. How he’d stormed into Fury’s office spoiling for a fight, gotten halfway through his opening argument before looking down and seeing that all the forms were lined up right there on the desk, waiting for Clint’s signature as the new hire’s supervising officer. “There’s a reason I gave you this assignment, Barton,” Fury had said, not unkindly. “Of course, I didn’t think you’d go and fall in _love_ with her, but, well.” He’d grinned and Clint had blushed in spite of himself. “I hoped you’d make the right call when it came down to it, and you did.”

One day, he’ll tell her. But today, Clint turns to face Natasha fully, to trace the happiness in the contours of her smile. “The only thing you’ll ever owe me,” he says, careful, “The only thing I’ll ever want from you, Is the guarantee that you’re going to live your life to the fullest. That’s all I want. Ever.”

She looks at him for a long moment, only the light moving between them; then she stands and pulls him up with her. “C’mon,” she says, pulling him with her down the corridor.

Clint laughs, lets her lead him away. “Where are we going?”

In the skylight of the atrium, Natasha is rimmed with golden sunlight, flawless, resplendent. “I don’t know,” she says with a carefree shrug, full of possibility. “To live my fullest life, I guess.” She pulls him close behind a column and kisses him so fast he sees stars. “And no matter where that leads, I know it includes you.”

**Author's Note:**

> The books Natasha reads, in order are: _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_ by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, _The Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet_ by William Shakespeare, _The Red and the Black_ by Stendhal, and _The Name of the Rose_ by Umberto Eco.  
>  Also, this is my first M rated fic, so... yay?


End file.
